Your email address plays a necessary part in the image of your business.

The absolute simplest way to use the Internet to give a boost to your business image, even without a website, is to begin using your own Internet address in your emails.

Your Prospect's Perspective

Let's consider your prospect's perspective because email is an increasingly significant point of customer or client contact.

Advertise yourname@yourbusiness.com.au instead of yourname@hotmail.com and you'll
earn respect instead of suspicion in the minds of your prospects even before you meet them or talk with them.

You need to show your prospects and customers alike ...

that you have faith your business is here to stay;

that you really do care about the image you create in their mind about your business;

and yes, your business can afford the extremely small outlay required for a professional looking email address.

Otherwise there's immediately a potential deterrent to that prospect doing business with you - something that could have easily been avoided. It's an "image" issue.

An addressfor your business like yourname@yourbusiness.com.auis even more effective for image and credibility than an address like yourbusiness@optusnet.com.au
or yourbusiness@bigpond.net.au etc. Your own Internet address really focuses attention on your business name. Why should you
advertise Bigpond, Optusnet or AAPT in your business email address?

Save Time and Money

Having your own business email address also gives you flexibility and can save you time and money...

An address like yourname@yourbusiness.com.au can be set up very simply to automatically forward to any other email address,
or be received directly in to your existing
mail program, so you can still receive your email in exactly the same way you do now.

If you change your current Internet Service Provider from Bigpond (or you change from yahoo.com, hotmail.com etc), you won't need to change all your business
stationery and advise all your contacts of a new email address.
You'll be able to make a simple adjustment to the way your mail
is directed.

You'll continue to receive email without
interruption and with no fuss you'll have managed your change of email address.
This type of task might otherwise cost you hours of work and considerable expense.

You'll be able to access your email from anywhere in the world too.

How Many Addresses?

When you're considering what type of
address you should have for your business, or the number of
addresses you should have, these days you have to think about
more than your own needs unfortunately. You have to think about
trying to avoid "spam" problems too.

"Spam" is the unsolicited commercial email
that many of us receive in our inboxes these days and besides
being illegal and very annoying, a lot of these emails can be
very offensive too.

A common way for spammers to collect email
addresses now is to use software to search through websites
looking for addresses that are displayed on the site, or even if
not displayed, the address may be coded in to the site in a
standard email address format.

On the websites I build I use special
methods to deter spammers, but it can also be a good added
measure to have an email address that's dedicated solely to your
website, like
info@yourbusiness.com.au. That address would never be used
for any other purpose. You would have another address like
yourname@yourbusiness.com.au that you would use as your
professional business email address for off-line promotions,
business cards, personal referrals etc.

Then if one day you start
receiving a lot of spam to
info@yourbusiness.com.au, you can simply have that address
deleted and create a replacement address for your website like
enquiries@yourbusiness.com.au. Because you will never have
used the info@ address for any purpose other than to permit
contact from your website, you don't need to let anyone know
that the address has changed.

My Solution

I can help you register a domain name like www.yourbusiness.com.au
at a place that can save you up to $200, and I'll show you how you could
also then have an unlimited number of email addresses associated with it like yourname@yourbusiness.com.au,
yourpartner@yourbusiness.com.au,
info@yourbusiness.com.au etc ...
all extremely cost effectively.

To find out more about how you can easily, and at a very low cost, set up professional looking email addresses for your business, take a look at options and
costs here.